Roughly 1,000 attendees headed to Phoenix Arizona this year for the GS1 Connect conference. The JW Marriot Desert Ridge provided a convenient and relaxed environment where retailers, suppliers and solution providers mingled for three days. I attended a number of sessions on the conference program and here are my highlights from select speakers.

Increasing acceptance of RFID and the double-digit growth rate of inlay/tag volumes in the past years have made smart labels an attractive business segment not only for the established RFID companies, but also for the traditional label manufacturers. The barrier for a label company to enter the RFID/smart label business is very low as their core business comprises of printing and converting anyways – adding “inlay insertion” or “inlay lamination” to the converting process will increase the label manufacturer’s value-add and enables meeting the customers’ RFID and IoT requirements.

Why not make your labels smart? Read more to find out why you should!

I have been going to the biggest RFID shows for 12 years now. In 2007, it was RFID World in Grapevine, TX. And for the last ten years, it has been RFID Journal Live!. Once again, I flew to Orlando to find out what is new and exciting in RFID. And I have to conclude that not much. Which is pretty much what I also said last year. But - there was something new after all.

Smart labels are basically really simple RF devices and look identical to each other. However, smart label deliveries are highly customized especially in high value specialty label segment. This sets two conflicting requirements for production machinery: high capacity and high flexibility. To address this dilemma, Voyantic has spent more than two years developing a new breed of smart label personalization solutions.

Both RAIN RFID and NFC have been focusing on their own applications and they don’t seem to have much in common. However, the two technologies have a common goal: they strive to be means for connecting items to the cloud. And the technologies don’t really compete against each other. So, it makes perfect sense that the two industries started to pull into one direction. That is why the RAIN RFID Alliance, the NFC Forum and AIM Global joined forces to arrange the first Connections Summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California.

Following research activities of RFID is a nice way to keep up with the latest technology developments. Awareness of hot research topics also helps in anticipating the direction of commercial development and new product launches. Here is my take on the published RFID research in 2017. I have included short comments on the research topics, and a number of links to papers published in 2017 that have caught my attention – for one reason or another.

Tightening cost, quality of care and efficiency requirements are some of the drivers that highlight healthcare as one of the strongly growing RFID application areas. RFID improves patient safety, raises operational efficiency and reduces shrinkage. To remove possible RFID related risks and uncertainties, a new test standard was created, describing methods for testing Medical Electric Equipment and System Electromagnetic Immunity against RFID readers.

RAIN RFID use has grown rapidly and implementations are expanding. Nowadays RFID is business as usual and quality management is an essential part of normal business operations. Quality really matters in RAIN tag manufacturing as high readability of tags is expected practically in all applications. In this text I describe how some quality management principles relate to tag manufacturing.

Something worried me before my first daughter’s arrival, something I had been already warned: “Babies are born without a handbook”. I am used to working with procedures, methodologies or at least to have some standards to follow; and now I was going to face the most demanding challenge in my life without any kind of guidance. But do babies and RFID actually have something in common?